No aid supplies left, staff starves in Gaza, Norwegian Refugee Council says

By Olivia Le Poidevin

GENEVA (Reuters) -The Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the largest independent aid organisations in Gaza, told Reuters on Tuesday its supplies were exhausted and some of its staff starving, and the group accused Israel of paralysing its work.

"Our last tent, our last food parcel, our last relief items have been distributed. There is nothing left," Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the council, told Reuters in an interview via video link from Oslo. 

The council, which has 64 Palestinian and two international staff on the ground in Gaza, echoed comments on Tuesday by the head of the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA who said its staff were fainting on the job from hunger and exhaustion. 

The NRC said that for the last 145 days, it has not been able to get tents, water, sanitation supplies, food and education materials into Gaza, where Israel has been at war against Palestinian group Hamas since October 2023 and the United Nations has warned of a worsening hunger crisis. 

"Hundreds of truckloads have been sitting in warehouses or in Egypt or elsewhere, and costing our Western European donors a lot of money, but they are blocked from coming in… That's why we are so angry. Because our job is to help," Egeland said. 

"Israel is not yielding. They just want to paralyse our work," he added.

COGAT, the Israeli military aid coordination agency, said in a statement that Israel does not restrict aid trucks entering Gaza, but international organisations face challenges in collecting the trucks on the Gaza side of border crossings.

Israel is working with the groups to improve the system, COGAT said, adding that more than 4,500 aid trucks carrying food for the U.N. and international organizations have entered the enclave in the last two months.

Many truckloads were still waiting to be picked up. COGAT said 950 shipments were on the Gaza sides of "the Kerem Shalom Crossing in the southern side of the Strip, and the Zikim Crossing in the northern part, pending collection and distribution."

COGAT has accused Hamas of stealing food, which Hamas denies.

The NRC said its supplies of safe drinking water were running out due to dwindling fuel to run desalination plants. The water has reached 100,000 people in central and northern parts of Gaza in recent weeks 

An Israeli official told Reuters that the U.N. has been given approval to bring in half a million liters of fuel.

"They're bringing in fuel and collecting, but they can bring in and they can collect more, and we are having discussions with them," the official said.

(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin; editing by Sharon Singleton, David Gregorio and Cynthia Osterman)